With a dozen essays and another seventeen narratives from individual performers/choreographers, When Men Dance uses both scholarship and anecdote to inquire into how masculinity takes shape through dance and what the effects of such constructions might be. The juxtaposition of one or more personal narratives with each essay attempts to contextualize the more traditional academic work, illustrating how a specific company member's experience (such as Christian Burns') correlates with the analysis of classical gendered norms transformed through Alonzo King's LINES ballet, or suggesting how a methodology of reading periodicals concerning baroque dance might inform the practice of its historical reconstruction. In this manner, the book is ambitious. Based on the editors' contacts and predilections, it covers a vast array of dance forms originating from several regions of the world. Certainly this scope, both in terms of prose-style and geography, is likely to interest readers of many sorts—from the scholar to the amateur dance student. But this movement across so many genres would also benefit from a bold theorization of the volume's titular topic to showcase the utility of this scholarly project, if not to maintain overall cohesion. Here the collection stumbles.
The book's Introduction offers a general overview of theories relating to masculinity and quickly proceeds to emphasize the ways in which dance elicits a trio of phobias (choreo, homo, and effemino). These analytical categories are explored through the book's somewhat illogical tripartite structure: “issues in the pink and blue west,” “historical perspectives,” and “legacies of colonialism.” While the first section focuses ostensibly on ballet and (Western) modern dance, the importance of these forms is never thoroughly articulated. If the point of their inclusion is to frame masculinity, might more work on hip-hop or even gogo boys be of value? In other words, what is productive about using concert dance as the initial set of examples? The second section is rather incoherent because almost all the contributions in this book offer some analysis of narratives framing the past. Perhaps particular problems in historiography animate this section, but an elaboration of these issues and the stakes involved never appears to orient the reader to their grouping. Instead, the Introduction states that Section Two looks at particular time periods, but the purpose of highlighting these historical moments never emerges. Finally, in setting up the last section, the editors miss the opportunity to explain in detail the relationship between the last third of the book and the first two. They posit that the reader should see links between choreophobia and orientalism. This guidepost is a bit inadequate. Does ending with a focus on the “Islamic Middle East and India” help us to understand history differently (22)? Why are these regions particularly important to choreographing masculinity? What are the relationships among ballet and the various folk or state-supported “traditional” forms discussed, given the emphasis in the first third of the book? Should we understand terms like homophobia differently when applied to cultural contexts where the individual sexualized subject emerges as a discrepant formation to local erotic practices?
Although the framing of the book's constituent pieces might have been strengthened, the individual contributions frequently provide provocative, often contrasting, insights into the ways that masculinity is articulated through movement. Maura Keefe offers a genealogy that traces the use of sport from Nijinsky through Shawn and Tharpe to Dancing with the Stars. The historical reach in this essay partners well with Yvonne Hardt's take on expressionist dance in Germany during the 1920s–1930s. To shift from the first essay and its focus on specific choreographers or events to ausdruckstanz, which informed a certain moment of nation building, enables the reader to see changes in scale. Whereas Keefe showcases individuals, Hardt shifts to masses and the communities that challenge national formation and the processes of mechanization associated with capital.
Many of the other pieces provide thick descriptions of movement vocabularies that construct masculinities in different contexts. In the contributions by dancers Fred Strickler and Rennie Harris, artists and teachers of different generations respectively from the Midwest and East Coast of the U.S., dance seems to have insinuated opposing masculinities within the communities in which each came of age. Such accounts of the diverse means by which movement registers and enacts larger social anxieties attendant to constructions of masculinity recur throughout the book. From Jennifer Fisher's and Jill Nunes Jensen's respective explorations of the hyperbolic imagination and expression of gendered relationships in classical ballet to Stephen Johnson's essay on transvestite acts in Juba's minstrel shows, this collection encourages both thinking through the body as scripted through matrices of gender but also the body as a sight of negotiation, perhaps even resistance, to the norms that obtain in a given time and place or through highly codified forms of corporeal expression. Here Juba's self-conscious play of gender might become the surprising antecedent to the choreography of Alonzo King. To be clear, my pairing of these two pieces does not gesture toward some imagined racial link but rather to an awareness of the constraints regulating people's expressive capacities at distinct moments in time.
For me, the collection produces its most substantive arguments in relation to how masculinity physically manifests under and as different regimes of power (e.g., Namus Zokhrabov's recounting of the politics within the Azerbaijan State Dance Ensemble). The invention of traditions, the propping up of national and international discourses on particular demonstrations of masculine power, the assertion of moving men as an exercise in modernity—these are the elements of the book that promise to advance dance and masculinity studies together. Along this line, the “legacies of colonialism” section furthers the steps begun by some of the earlier contributions. The emphasis here on overlapping disciplinary mechanisms that inform the perception of moving bodies articulates why bodies matter in particular configurations, spaces, and times (Anthony Shay's essay, for example, includes a wide overview of these issues). The labor of dancers harnessed to imperialist and nationalist ideals, often simultaneously, is worth exploring because the processes of empire and nation-state formation have long been analyzed in gendered terms. But the work here insists that these sorts of analyses must not only function at the level of discursive abstraction. Enactments of power can be the subtle acts of bodies moving independently or together; perhaps this is the principal reason to study when men dance.
However, the Introduction emphasizes phobia; When Men Dance is situated as a response to strategies that have marginalized dancing males. In this vein, the project seems not so distant from that of institutions such as The Gold School (a dance education venue in Massachusetts), which recently premiered its anti-bullying piece “accept ME.” Perhaps the field of dance studies requires this intervention. The editors seem to think so, for the Appendix reveals questions posed to generate discussion of stereotypes faced in the course of men's dancing careers. Because the brief narratives continually return the reader to the potential difficulties in choosing to be a male dancer, the volume as a whole shades a bit too much toward the therapeutic, at least for me. On the other hand, a nice bit of therapy for $29.95 is a good deal, and the reader will certainly learn something along the way.
